Service quality: See it from the subscriber’s point of view

Thierno Diallo

Product Manager

Thierno Diallo has been with EXFO since 2004. Prior to being appointed Product Specialist in 2007, he worked in R&D as Verification Engineer and Team Coordinator for the Datacom and Packet Technologies group. Thierno Diallo holds a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree from the École de technologie supérieure de Montréal and an Electronics Engineering Diploma from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology Polytechnic.

More and more service providers are moving beyond the delivery of “fat pipes” by offering value-added services that leverage existing and emerging access technologies, such as xDSL, fiber-to-the-x (FTTx), Metro, Gigabit Ethernet (GigE), and Wi-Fi and WiMAX innovations. And, in a quest to beat the competition, achieve sustainable broadband profitability and increase average revenue per user (ARPU), they are also offering premium mass-market consumer services such as ultra-high-speed Internet, online gaming, streaming audio, high-definition and interactive TV, as well as business offerings such as video conferencing on-demand (VoD), voice-over-IP (VoIP), Voice over DSL (VoDSL), Voice over Broadband (VoBB), and e-learning and application hosting. These on-demand and pay-per-user services help providers attract new customers, expand markets and create new revenue streams for existing subscribers—all with relatively low incremental costs.

However, when adding differentiated service offerings to monetize new access and applications, providers are also faced with new challenges. When it comes to business services, providers need to keep customers happy by delivering additional flexibility while assuring the quality and performance of the new services. To compound the situation, limited options are available in terms of solutions that are capable of continuously measuring and assuring the level of application performance experienced by end users. Finally, in addition to assuring the quality of experience delivered to customers, operators must be able to quickly restore service in the event of degradation or failure.

For this reason, providers need to look beyond the network layer and focus on end-user experience measurement to ensure that true end-to-end performance has been delivered. In this regard, quality-of-experience (QoE) management is key to delivering the best possible user experience to business services customers, boosting customer satisfaction, and reducing churn. To learn more about the technologies needed to actively monitor and improve the performance of business-critical applications from the end-user point of view, check out our Business Services Monitoring application note.